Window on Eurasia

Not by Oil Alone – How Moscow Misreads Ethnic Conflicts

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 19, 2006 – Moscow analysts and policy makers up to and including President Vladimir Putin, just like their Soviet-era predecessors, assume that ethnic conflicts are the product of and can be resolved by economics alone, according to a leading Moscow commentator.

There is only one difference, Yevgeniy Krutikov argues in an essay
posted online this week: The Marxist-Leninists of Soviet times assumed
that improving the standard of living of those involved would solve the
problem, while the capitalists of today assume it is all about oil and
gas
[http://www.prognosis.ru/news/geopolitic/2006/7/17/bdt.html].

Given their attachment to Marxist ideas about the primacy of economics,
he says, it is perhaps not surprising that the Soviet leadership fell
into this trap. But the depth of the hole into which Moscow fell at the
end of the Soviet period is far greater than many even now recognise.

When the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh
began, officials on the staff of the CPSU Central Committee developed
what they called “the sausage theory” to explain what was going on
and to guide Moscow’s actions. The results of that misunderstanding
were horrific, Krutikov points out.

On the one hand, Moscow decided to send millions of Soviet-era rubles
to the region, 60 percent of which were stolen by members of the local
nomenklatura but 40 percent of which were used by Armenians and
Azerbaijanis to buy arms and thus make the conflict more deadly and
less soluble.

In this way, “a system which saw economics everywhere it looked, even
in the mirro, itself ended by financing a war” that helped undermine
its own power and ultimately lead to the disintegration of the Soviet
Union.

And on the other, the Soviet leadership demonstrated its inability to
understand that this conflict was about far more than economics when it
dispatched a Politburo member to Stepanakert who said to an Armenian
crowd there: “I do not understand how two fraternal Muslim peoples
cannot share things among themselves.”

He had to be evacuated by helicopter, Krutikov notes.

All of this should have changed when the Communist system was
overthrown, Krutikov continues, but it hasn’t. And he suggests that
the reasons for this often tragic continuity are to be found both in
the links between the Soviet and post-Soviet elites and in the
attitudes of many in the West.

Where are the people who dreamed up “the sausage theory” of the
1980s? Krutikov asks rhetorically. They have not disappeared. Instead,
“the majority of them are teaching something -- at times even in the
Presidential Academy of Administration. That’s too bad for their
students.”

Many of them will learn from their professors that the conflict in
Northern Ireland is the result of the inequitable distribution of
ration coupons for sausages and that Arab students are burning 90 cars a night
in Paris suburbs “because poor people there have low unemployment
benefits.”

Several ethnic conflicts in Eurasia should have been enough to
undermine such conceptions: The conflict in South Ossetia, Krutikov suggests, can hardly be explained by economic theories because in 1989 there really
was not an economy there. Only a convinced Marxist, it would seem,
could assume otherwise.

But if Marxism has receded at least in public as an explanation for
ethnic conflicts and their resolution, the West’s approach to these
conflicts has had the effect, intended or not, of leading post-Soviet
Russian officials to conclude that economics remains all both as a
cause and as a cure.

Many Western analysts have argued that the recently opened Baku-Jeyhan
pipeline will help resolve ethnic conflicts in the southern Caucasus by
increasing the resources available to the governments and societies of
Georgia and Azerbaijan, and in response, Russian commentators have
developed a whole new set of conspiracy theories.

They view oil and gas reserves and pipeline routes to carry these
products to foreign markets as the cause and hence the possible
solution of ethnic conflicts not just because of their own Marxist backgrounds
but because Western leaders appear to believe that as well.

Indeed, Krutikov notes, many Russian analysts have decided that the
neo-Marxist conspiracy theories about ethnic conflicts, theories behind
such Hollywood films as “Syriana,” are reason enough for Moscow
not to question its analytic and policy positions.

“If even Warner Brothers believes in this kind of conspiracy
theories, then just what should be expected from Russian and regional apolitical
scientists and analyts who received A’s in their courses on ‘the
history of the CPSU’ in [Soviet-era] institutes?” Krutikov asks
with obvious irony.

And he concludes sadly that if both Moscow and the West continue to
believe that ethnic conflicts are primarily about economics rather than
about a variety of other values, “many of which are more more
important than oil,” then there will be even more such conflicts on
the territory of the former Soviet space in the future.

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